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MATTHEW ARNOLD 




EETNESS AND 

L^lCjJrl 1 *^ *^ J' J' ^ J' 



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BY MATTHEW ARNOLD 



FE:> 17 18961 



ni. IV*.'; 



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Philadelphia^ ,^ Jt Jt ^ 

HENRY ALTEMUS 



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COPYRIGHTED 1896 

BY HENRY ALTEMUS 






Hbnry Altemus, Manufacturer 
philadelphia 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 



THE disparagers of culture make its motive 
curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make 
its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The 
culture which is supposed to plume itself on a 
smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture 
which is begotten by nothing so intellectual 
as curiosity ; it is valued either out of sheer 
vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of 
social and class distinction, separating its 
holder, like a badge or title, from other people 
who have not got it. No serious man would 
call this ciilturfy or attach any value to it, as 
culture, at all. To find the real ground for the 
very differing estimate which serious people 
will set upon culture, we must find some mo- 
tive for culture in the terms of which may 
lie a real ambiguity ; and such a motive the 
word curiosity gives us. 

I have before now pointed out that we 
English do not, like the foreigners, use this 
word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense. 



4 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

With US the word is always used in a some- 
what disapproving sense. A liberal and intel- 
ligent eagerness about the things of the mind 
may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks 
of curiosity, but with us the word always con- 
veys a certain notion of frivolous and unedify- 
ing activity. In the Quarterly Review y some 
little time ago, was an estimate of the cele- 
brated French critic, M. Sainte-Beuve, and a 
very inadequate estimate it in my judgment 
was. And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in 
this : that in our English way it left out of 
sight the double sense really involved in the 
word curiosity y thinking enough was said to 
stamp M. Sainte-Beuve with blame if it was 
said that he was impelled in his operations 
as a critic by curiosity, and omitting either to 
perceive that M. Sainte-Beuve himself, and 
many other people with him, would consider 
that this was praiseworthy and not blame- 
worthy, or to point out why it ought really to 
be accounted worthy of blame and not of 
praise. For as there is a curiosity about 
intellectual matters which is futile, and merely 
a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity — a 
desire after the things of the mind simply for 
their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing 
them as they are — which is, in an intelligent 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 5 

being, natural and laudable. Nay, and the 
very desire to see things as they are, implies 
a balance and regulation of mind which is 
not often attained without fruitful effort, and 
which is the very opposite of the blind and 
diseased impulse of mind which is what we 
mean to blame when we blame curiosity. 
Montesquieu says : " The first motive which i 
ought to impel us to study is the desire to 
augment the excellence of our nature, andl 
to render an intelligent being yet more/ 
intelligent." This is the true ground to' 
assign for the genuine scientific passion, 
however manifested, and for culture, viewed 
simply as a fruit of this passion ; and it is a 
worthy ground, even though we let the term 
curiosity stand to describe it. 

But there is of culture another view, in 
which not solely the scientific passion, the 
sheer desire to see things as they are, natural 
and proper in an intelligent being, appears as 
the ground of it. There is a view in which all 
the love of our neighbor, the impulses toward 
action, help, and beneficence, the desire for 
removing human error, clearing human confu- 
sion, and diminishing human misery, the 
noble aspiration to leave the world better and 
happier than we found it, — motives eminently 



6 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

such as are called social, — come in as part of 
the grounds of culture, and the main and pre- 
eminent part. Culture is then properly de- 
scribed not as having its origin in curiosity, 
but as having its origin in the love of perfec- 
tion ; it is « study of perfection. It moves by 
the force, not merely or primarily of the 
scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also 
of the moral and social passion for doing 
good. As, in the first view of it, we took for 
its worthy motto Montesquieu's words : '' To 
render an intelligent being yet more intelli- 
gent," so, in the second view of it, there is no 
better motto which it can have than these 
words of Bishop Wilson : " To make reason 
and the will of God prevail." 

Only, whereas the passion for doing good 
is apt to be overhasty in determining what 
reason and the will of God say, because its 
turn is for acting rather than thinking and it 
wants to be beginning to act ; and whereas it 
is apt to take its own conceptions, which pro- 
ceed from its own state of development and 
share in all the imperfections and immaturities 
of this, for a basis of action; what distin- 
guishes culture is, that it is possessed by the 
scientific passion, as well as by the passion of 
doing good ; that it demands worthy notions 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 7 

of reason and the will of God, and does not 
readily suffer its own crude conceptions to 
substitute themselves for them. And know- 
ing that no action or institution can be salu- 
tary and stable which are not based on reason 
and the will of God, it is not so bent on acting 
and instituting, even with the great aim of 
diminishing human error and misery ever be- 
fore its thoughts, but that it can remember 
that acting and instituting are of little use, 
unless we know how and what we ought to act 
and to institute. 

This culture is more interesting and more 
far-reaching than that other, which is founded 
solely on the scientific passion for knowing. 
But it needs times of faith and ardor, times 
when the intellectual horizon is opening and 
widening all round us, to flourish in. And is 
not the close and bounded intellectual horizon 
within which we have long lived and moved 
now lifting up, and are not new lights finding 
free passage to shine in upon us } For a long 
time there was no passage for them to make 
their way in upon us, and then it was of no 
use to think of adapting the world's action to 
them. Where was the hope of making reason 
and the will of God prevail among people who 
had a routine which they had christened rea- 



8 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

son and the will of God, in which they were 
inextricably bound, and beyound which they 
had no power of looking ? But now the iron 
force of adhesion to the old routine — social, 
political, religious — has wonderfully yielded ; 
the iron force of exclusion of all which is 
new has wonderfully yielded. The danger 
now is, not that people should obstinately re- 
fuse to allow any thing but their old routine 
to pass for reason and the will of God, but 
either that they should allow some novelty or 
other to pass for these too easily, or else that 
they should underrate the importance of them 
altogether, and think it enough to follow 
action for its own sake, without troubling 
themselves to make reason and the will of 
God prevail therein. Now, then, is the mo- 
ment for culture to be of service, culture 
which believes in making reason and the will 
of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the 
study and pursuit of perfection, and is no 
longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclu- 
sion of whatever is new, from getting accept- 
ance for its ideas, simply because they are 
new. 

The moment this view of culture is seized, 
the moment it is regarded not solely as the 
endeavor to see things as they are, to draw 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 9 

toward a knowledge of the universal order 
which seems to be intended and aimed at in 
the world, and which it is a man's happiness 
to go along with or his misery to go counter 
to, — to learn, in short, the will of God, — the 
moment, I say, culture is considered not 
merely as the endeavor to see and lear7i this, 
but as the endeavor, also, to make it prevail, 
the moral, social, and beneficent character of 
culture becomes manifest. The mere en- 
deavor to see and learn the truth for our own 
personal satisfaction is iirdeed a commence- 
ment for making it prevail, a preparing the 
v/ay for this, which always serves this, and is 
wrongly, therefore, stamped with blame abso- 
lutely in itself and not only in its caricature 
and degeneration. But perhaps it has got 
stamped with blame, and disparaged with the 
dubious title of curiosity, because in compari- 
son with this wider endeavor of such great 
and plain utility it looks selfish, petty, and 
unprofitable. 

And religion, the greatest and most im- 
portant of the efforts by which the human 
race has manifested its impulse to perfect 
itself,— religion, that voice of the deepest 
human experience, — does not only enjoin and 
sanction the aim which is the great aim of 



lo SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, 

culture, the aim of setting ourselves to ascer- 
tain what perfection is and to make it prevail ; 
but also in determining generally in what 
human perfection consists, religion comes 
to a conclusion identical with that which 
j culture — seeking the determination of this 
I question through all the voices of human ex- 
perience which have been heard upon it, of art, 
science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well 
as religion, in order to give a greater fulness 
and certainty to its solution — likewise reaches. 
. Religion says : The kingdom of God is within 
you; and culture, in like manner, places hu- 
man perfection in an internal condition, in the 
growth and predominance of our humanity 
proper, as distinguished from our animality. 
It places it in the ever-increasing efficacy and 
in the general harmonious expansion of those 
gifts of thought and feeling, which make the 
peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of hu- 
man nature. As I have said on a former 
occasion : " It is in making endless additions 
to itself, in the endless expansion of its pow- 
ers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, 
that the spirit of the human race finds its 
ideal. To reach this ideal, culture is an in- 
dispensable aid, and that is the true value of 
culture." Not a having and a resting, but 



5 H^EE TNESS AND LIGHT. 1 1 

a growing and a becoming, is the character of 
perfection as culture conceives it ; and here, 
too, it coincides with religion. 

And because men are all members of one 
great whole, and the sympathy which is in 
human nature will not allow one member to 
be indifferent to the rest, or to have a perfect 
welfare independent of the rest, the expansion 
of our humanity, to suit the idea of perfection 
which culture forms, must be a ^^;/^r.f7/ expan- 
sion. Perfection, as culture conceives it, is 
not possible while the individual remains 
isolated. The individual is required, under 
pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his 
own development if he disobeys, to carry 
others along with him in his march toward 
perfection, to be continually doing all he can 
to enlarge and increase the volume of the 
human stream sweeping thitherward. And 
here, once more, culture lays on us the same 
obligation as religion, which says, as Bishop 
Wilson has admirably put it, that "to pro- 
mote the kingdom of God is to increase and 
hasten one's own happiness." 

But, finally, perfection — as culture from a 
thorough disinterested study of human nature 
and human experience learns to conceive it — 
is an harmonious expansion of all the powers 



12 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

which make the beauty and worth of human 
nature, and is not consistent with the over-de- 
velopment of any one power at the expense 
of the rest. Here culture goes beyond relig- 
ion, as religion is generally conceived by us. 
If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and 
of harmonious perfection, general perfection, 
and perfection which consists in becoming 
something rather than in having something, 
in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, 
not in an outward set of circumstances, — it is 
clear that culture, instead of being the frivo- 
lous and useless thing which Mr. Bright and 
Mr. Frederic Harrison, and many other Lib- 
erals are apt to call it, has a very important 
function to fulfil for mankind. And this func- 
tion is particularly important in our modern 
world, of which the whole civilization is, to a 
much greater degree than the civilization of 
Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, 
and tends constantly to become more so. 
But above all in our own country has culture a 
weighty part to perform, because here that 
mechanical character, which civilization tends 
to take everywhere, is shown in the most 
eminent degree. Indeed, nearly all the char- 
acters of perfection, as culture teaches us to 
fix them, meet in this country with some pow- 



SIPEETNESS AND LIGHT. 13 

erful tendency which thwarts them and sets 
them at defiance. The idea of perfection as 
an inward (^OYvdSxXoxi of the mind and spirit is 
at variance with the mechanical and material 
civilization in esteem with us, and nowhere, as 
I have said, so much in esteem as with us. 
The idea of perfection as a general expansion 
of the human family is at variance with our 
strong individualism, our hatred of all limits 
to the unrestrained swing of the individual's 
personality, our maxim of "every man for 
himself." Above all, the idea of perfection as 
an harmonious expansion of human nature is 
at variance with our want of flexibility, in our 
inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a 
thing, with our intense energetic absorption 
in the particular pursuit we happen to be fol- 
lowing. So culture has a rough task to 
achieve in this country. Its preachers have, 
and are likely long to have, a hard time of it, 
and they will much oftener be regarded for a 
great while to come, as elegant or spurious 
Jeremiahs, than as friends and benefactors. 
That, however, will not prevent their doing in 
the end good service if they persevere. And 
meanwhile, the mode of action they have to 
pursue, and the sort of habits they must fight 
against, ought to be made quite clear for every 



14 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, 

one to see, who may be willing to look at the 
matter attentively and dispassionately. 

Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting 
danger ; often in machinery most absurdly dis- 
proportioned to the end which this machinery, 
if it is to do any good at all, is to serve ; but 
always in machinery, as if it had a value in and 
for itself. What is freedom but machinery ? 
what is population but machinery? what is coal 
but machinery? what are railroads but ma- 
chinery ? what is wealth but machinery ? what 
are, even, religious organizations but ma- 
chinery ? Now almost every voice in England 
is accustomed to speak of these things as if 
they were precious ends in themselves, and 
therefore had some of the characters of per- 
fection indisputably joined to them. I have 
before now noticed Mr. Roebuck's stock 
argument for proving the greatness and hap- 
piness of England as she is, and for quite 
stopping the mouths of all gainsayers. Mr. 
Roebuck is never weary of reiterating this 
argument of his, so I do not know why I 
should be weary of noticing it. **May not 
every man in England say what he likes ?" — 
Mr. Roebuck perpetually asks ; and that, he 
thinks, is quite sufficient, and when every man 
may say what he likes, our aspirations ought 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 15 

to be satisfied. But the aspirations of cul- 
ture, which is the study of perfection, are not 
satisfied, unless what men say, when they 
may say what they like, is worth saying — 
has good in it, and more good than bad. In 
the same way the TimeSy replying to some 
foreign strictures on the dress, looks, and be- 
havior of the English abroad, urges that the 
English ideal is that every one should be free 
to do and to look just as he likes. But cul- 
ture indefatigably tries, not to make what eachi 
raw person may like the rule by which he ' 
fashions himself ; but to draw ever nearer to , 
a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful 
and becoming, and to get the raw person to 
like that. 

And in the same way with respect to rail- 
roads and coal. Every one must have observed 
the strange language current during the late 
discussions as to the possible failure of our 
supplies of coal. Our coal, thousands of peo- 
ple were saying, is the real basis of our 
national greatness ; if our coal runs short, 
there is an end of the greatness of England. 
But what is greatness } culture makes us ask. 
Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to 
excite love, interest, and admiration ; and the 
outward proof of possessing greatness is that 



i6 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, 

we excite love, interest, and admiration. If 
England were swallowed up by the sea to- 
morrow, which of the two, a hundred years 
hence, would most excite the love, interest, 
and admiration of mankind, — would most, 
therefore, show the evidences of having pos- 
sessed greatness,— the England of the last 
twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, of 
a time of splendid spiritual effort, but when 
our coal, and our industrial operations depend- 
ing on coal, were very little developed ? Well, 
then, what an unsound habit of mind it must 
be which makes us talk of things like coal or 
iron as constituting the greatness of England, 
and how salutary a friend is culture, bent on 
seeing things as they are, and thus dissipating 
delusions of this kind and fixing standards of 
perfection that are real ! 

Wealth, again, that end to which our pro- 
digious works for material advantage are di- 
rected, — the commonest of commonplaces 
tells us how men are always apt to regard 
wealth as a precious end in itself ; and cer- 
tainly they have never been so apt thus to 
regard it as they are in England at the present 
time. Never did people believe anything 
more firmly than nine Englishmen out of ten 
at the present day believe that our greatness 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 17 

and welfare are proved by our being so very 
rich. Now, the use of culture is that it helps 
us, by means of its spiritual standard of per- 
fection, to regard wealth as but machinery, 
and not only to say, as a matter of words, that 
we regard wealth as but machinery, but really 
to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were 
not for this purging effect wrought upon our 
minds by culture, the whole world, the future 
as well as the present, would inevitably be- 
long to the Philistines. The people who 
believe most that our greatness and welfare 
are proved by our being very rich, and who 
most give their lives and thoughts to becom- 
ing rich, are just the very people whom we 
call Philistines. Culture says: ''Consider 
these people, then, their way of life, their 
habits, their manners, the very tones of their 
voice ; look at them attentively ; observe the 
literature they read, the things which give 
them pleasure, the words which come forth 
out of their mouths, the thoughts which make 
the furniture of their minds : would any 
amount of wealth be worth having with the 
condition that one was to become just like 
these people by having it V And thus cul- 
ture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the 
highest possible value in stemming the com- 



i8 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

mon tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy and 
industrial community, and which saves the 
future, as one may hope, from being vulgar- 
ized, even if it cannot save the present. 

Population, again, and bodily health and 
vigor, are things which are nowhere treated 
in such an unintelligent, misleading, exagger- 
ated way as in England. Both are really ma- 
chinery ; yet how many people all around us 
do we see rest in them and fail to look beyond 
them ! Why, one has heard people, fresh 
from reading certain articles of the Tunes on 
the Registrar-General's returns of marriages 
and births in this country, who would talk of 
our large English families in quite a solemn 
strain, as if they had something in itself 
beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them ; 
as if the British Philistine would have only to 
present himself before the Great Judge with 
his twelve children, in order to be received 
among the sheep as a matter of right ! 

But bodily health and vigor, it may be said, 
are not to be classed with wealth and popula- 
tion as mere machinery ; they have a more 
real and essential value. True ; but only as 
they are more intimately connected with a 
perfect spiritual condition than wealth or 
population are. The moment we disjoin them 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 19 

from the idea of a perfect spiritual condition, 
and pursue them, as we do pursue them, for 
their own sake, and as ends in themselves, our 
worship of them becomes as mere worship of 
machinery, as our worship of wealth or popu- 
lation, and as unintelligent and vulgarizing a 
worship as that is. Every one with anything 
like an adequate idea of human perfection has 
distinctly marked this subordination to higher 
and spiritual ends of the cultivation of bodily 
vigor and activity. " Bodily exercise profiteth 
little; but godliness is profitable unto all 
things," says the author of the Epistle to 
Timothy. And the utilitarian Franklin says 
just as explicitly: "Eat and drink such an 
exact quantity as suits the constitution of thy 
body, ifi reference to the services of the mind!' 
But the point of view of culture, keeping the 
mark of human perfection simply and broadly 
in view, and not assigning to this perfection, 
as religion or utilitarianism assign to it, a spe- 
cial and limited character, — this point of view, 
I say, of culture is best given by these words 
of Epictetus : " It is a sign of d</)via," says 
he, — that is, of a nature not finely tempered, — 
" to give yourselves up to things which relate 
to the body ; to make, for instance, a great 
fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, 



20 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

a great fuss about drinking, a great fuss about 
walking, a great fuss about riding. All these 
things ought to be done merely by the way : 
the formation of the spirit and character must 
be our real concern." This is admirable ; and, 
indeed, the Greek word cv<^via, a finely-tem- 
pered nature, gives exactly the notion of per- 
fection as culture brings us to perceive it : 
an harmonious perfection, a perfection in 
which the characters of beauty and intelli- 
gence are both present, which unites " the two 
noblest of things," — as Swift, who of one of 
the two, at any rate, had himself all too little, 
most happily calls them in his " Battle of the 
Books," " the two noblest of things, siveetness 
and light'' The ev<f)vri^ is the man who tends 
toward sweetness and light ; the dc^v^is, on the 
other hand, is our Philistine. The imm.ense 
spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to 
their having been inspired with this central 
and happy idea of the essential character of 
human perfection ; and Mr. Bright's miscon- 
ception of culture, as a smattering of Greek 
and Latin, comes itself, after all, from this 
wonderful significance of the Greeks having 
affected the very machinery of our education, 
and is in itself a kind of homage to it. 

In thus making sweetness and light to be 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 21 

characters of perfection, culture is of like 
spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry. 
Far more than on our freedom, our population 
and our industrialism, many amongst us rely 
upon our religious organizations to save us. 
I have called religion a yet more important 
manifestation of human nature than poetry, 
because it has worked on a broader scale for 
perfection, and with greater masses of men. 
But the idea of beauty and of a human nature 
perfect on all its sides, which is the dominant 
idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea, 
though it has not yet had the success that the 
idea of conquering the obvious faults of our 
animality, and of a human nature perfect on 
the moral side, — which is the dominant idea 
of religion, — has been enabled to have ; and 
it is destined, adding to itself the religious idea 
of a devout energy, to transform and govern 
the other. 

The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in 
which religion and poetry are one, in which 
the idea of beauty and of a human nature per- 
fect on all sides adds to itself a religious and 
devout energy, and works in the strength of 
that, is on this account of such surpassing 
interest and instructiveness for us, though it 
was— as, having regard to the human race in 



22 SWEETNESS AXD LIGHT. 

general, and, indeed, having regard to the 
Greeks themselves, we must own — a prema- 
ture attempt, an attempt which for success 
needed the moral and religious fibre in hu- 
manity to be more braced and developed than 
it had yet been. But Greece did not err in 
having the idea of beauty, harmony, and com- 
plete human perfection so present and para- 
mount. It is impossible to have this idea too 
present and paramount ; only, the moral fibre 
must be braced too. And we, because we 
have braced the moral fibre, are not on that 
account in the right way, if at the same time 
the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete 
human perfection is wanting or misappre- 
hended amongst us ; and evidently it is want- 
ing or misapprehended at present. And 
when we rely as we do on our religious or- 
ganizations, which in themselves do not and 
cannot give us this idea, and think we have 
done enough if we make them spread and pre- 
vail, then, I say, we fall into our common 
fault of overvaluing machinery. 

Nothing is more common than for people to 
confound the inward peace and satisfaction 
which follow the subduing of the obvious 
faults of our animality with what I may call 
absolute inward peace and satisfaction — the 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 23 

peace and satisfaction which are reached as 
we draw near to complete spiritual perfection, 
and not merely to moral perfection, or rather 
to relative moral perfection. No people in 
the world have done more and struggled more 
to attain this relative moral perfection than 
our English race has. For no people in the 
world has the command to resist the devily to 
overcome the zvicked one^ in the nearest and 
most obvious sense of those words, had such 
a pressing force and reality. And we have 
had our reward, not only in the great worldly 
prosperity which our obedience to this com- 
mand has brought us, but also, and far more, 
in great inward peace and satisfaction. But 
to me few things are more pathetic than to 
see people, on the strength of inward peace 
and satisfaction which their rudimentary 
efforts toward perfection have brought them, 
employ, concerning their incomplete perfec- 
tion and the religious organizations within 
which they have found it, language which 
properly applies only to complete perfection, 
and is a far-off echo of the human soul's proph- 
ecy of it. Religion itself, I need hardly sa)^ 
supplies them in abundance with this grand 
language. And very freely do they use it ; 
yet it is really the severest possible criticism 



24 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

of such an incomplete perfection as alone we 
have yet reached through our religious organi- 
zations. 

The impulse of the English race toward 
moral development and self-conquest has no- 
where so powerfully manifested itself as in 
Puritanism. Nowhere has Puritanism found 
so adequate an expression as in the religious 
organization of the Independents. The mod- 
ern Independents have a newspaper, the Noii- 
cojifonnisty written with great sincerity and 
ability. The motto, the standard, the profes- 
sion of faith which this organ of theirs carries 
aloft is : "The Dissidence of Dissent and the 
Protestantism of the Protestant Religion." 
There are sweetness and light, and an ideal of 
complete harmonious human perfection ! One 
need not go to culture and poetry to find lan- 
guage to judge it. Religion, with its instinct 
for perfection, supplies language to judge it, 
language, too, v/hich is in our mouths every 
day. *' Finally, be of one mind, united in 
feeling," says St. Peter. There is an ideal 
which judges the Puritan ideal: "The Dissi- 
dence of Dissent and the Protestantism of 
the Protestant Religion !" And religious or- 
ganizations like this are what people believe 
in, rest in, would give their lives for ! Such, 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 25 

I say, is the wonderful virtue of even the be- 
ginnings of perfection, of having conquered 
even the plain faults of our animality, that 
the religious organization which has helped 
us to do it can seem to us something precious, 
salutary, and to be propagated, even when it 
wears such a brand of imperfection on its 
forehead as this. And men have got such a 
habit of giving to the language of religion a 
special application, of making it a mere jar- 
gon, that for the condemnation which religion 
itself passes on the shortcomings of their 
religious organizations they have no ear ; 
they are sure to cheat themselves and to ex- 
plain this condemnation away. They can 
only be reached by the criticism which culture, 
like poetry, speaking a language not to be 
sophisticated, and resolutely testing these or- 
ganizations by the ideal of a human perfec- 
tion complete on all sides applies to them. 

But men of culture and poetry, it will be 
said, are again and again failing, and failing 
conspicuously, in the necessary first stage to 
an harmonious perfection, in the subduing of 
the great obvious faults of our animality, 
which it is the glory of these religious or- 
ganizations to have helped us to subdue. 
True, they do often so fail. They have often 



26 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

been without the virtues as well as the faults 
of the Puritan ; it has been one of their dan- 
gers that they so felt the Puritan's faults that 
they too much neglected the practice of his 
virtues. I will not, however, exculpate them 
at the Puritan's expense. They have often 
failed in morality, and morality is indispens- 
able. And they have been punished for their 
failure, as the Puritan has been rewarded for 
his performance. They have been punished 
wherein they erred ; but their ideal of beauty, 
of sweetness and light, and a human nature 
complete on all its sides, remains the true 
ideal of perfection still ; just as the Puritan's 
ideal of perfection remains narrow and inade- 
quate, although for what he did well he has 
been richly rewarded. Notwithstanding the 
mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers' voy- 
age, they and their standard of perfection are 
rightly judged when we figure to ourselves 
Shakespeare or Virgil — souls in whom sweet- 
ness and light, and all that in human nature 
is most humane, were eminent, accompanying 
them on their voyage, and think what intoler- 
able company Shakespeare and Virgil would 
have found them .'' In the same way let us 
judge the religious organizations which we 
see all around us. Do not let us deny the 



SWEETNESS A AD LIGHT. 27 

good and the happiness which they have ac- 
complished, but do not let us fail to see 
clearly that their idea of human perfection is 
narrow and inadequate, and that the Dissi- 
dence of Dissent and the Protestantism of 
the Protestant Religion will never bring hu- 
manity to its true goal. As I said with regard 
to wealth : Let us look at the life of those 
who live in and for it — so I say with regard to 
the religious organizations. Look at the life 
imaged in such a newspaper as the Noncon- 
formist — a life of jealousy of the Establish- 
ment, disputes, tea-meetings, openings of 
chapels, sermons ; and then think of it as an 
ideal of a human life completing itself on all 
sides, and aspiring with all its organs after 
sweetness, light, and perfection ! 

Another newspaper, representing, like the 
Nonconfonnisty one of the religious organiza- 
tions of this country, was a short time ago 
giving an account of the crowd at Epsom on 
the Derby day, and of all the vice and hideous- 
ness which were to be seen in that crowd ; 
and then the writer turned suddenly round 
upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how 
he proposed to cure all this vice and hideous- 
ness without religion. I confess I felt disposed 
to ask the asker this question : And how do 



28 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

you propose to cure it with such a religion as 
yours ? How is the ideal of a life so unlovely, 
so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so 
far removed from a true and satisfying ideal 
of human perfection, as is the life of your 
religious organization as you yourself image 
it, to conquer and transform all this vice and 
hideousness ? Indeed, the strongest plea for 
the study of perfection as pursued by culture, 
the clearest proof of the actual inadequacy 
of the idea of perfection held by the religious 
organizations, — expressing, as I have said, the 
most wide-spread effort which the human race 
has yet made after perfection, — is to be found 
in the state of our life and society with these 
in possession of it, and having been in pos- 
session of it I know not how many hundred 
years. We are all of us included in some re- 
ligious organization or other ; we all call our- 
selves, in the sublime and aspiring language 
of religion which I have before noticed, chil- 
dren of God. Children of God ; — it is an 
immense pretension ! — and how are we to 
justify it ? By the works which we do, and 
the words which we speak. And the work 
which we collective children of God do, our 
grand centre of life, our city which we have 
builded for us to dwell in, is London ! Lon- 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 29 

don, with its unutterable external hideousness, 
and with its internal canker oi public^ egestas^ 
privatim opulentia, — to use the words which 
Sallust puts into Cato's mouth about Rome, — 
unequalled in the world ! The word, again, 
which we children of God speak, the voice 
which most hits our collective thought, the 
newspaper with the largest circulation in 
England, nay, with the largest circulation in 
the whole world, is the Daily Telegraph ! I 
say that when our religious organizations, — 
which I admit to express the most consider- 
able effort after perfection that our race has 
yet made, — land us in no better result than 
this, it is high time to examine carefully their 
idea of perfection, to see whether it does not 
leave out of account sides and forces of 
human nature which we might turn to great 
use ; whether it would not be more operative 
if it were more complete. And I say that the 
English reliance on our religious organizations 
and on their ideas of human perfection just as 
they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on 
muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, 
on wealth, — mere belief in machinery, and 
unfruitful ; and that it is wholesomely coun- 
teracted by culture, bent on seeing things as 
they are, and on drawing the human race 



30 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

onward to a more complete, an harmonious 
perfection. 

Culture, however, shows its single-minded 
love of perfection, its desire simply to make 
reason and the will of God prevail, its freedom 
from fanaticism, by its attitude toward all this 
machinery, even while it insists that it is 
machinery. Fanatics, seeing the mischief 
men do themselves by their blind belief in 
some machinery or other, — whether it is 
wealth and industrialism, or whether it is the 
cultivation of bodily strength and activity, or 
whether it is a political organization, or 
whether it is a religious organization, — 
oppose with might and main the tendency to 
this or that political and religious organiza- 
tion, or to games and athletic exercises, or to 
wealth and industrialism, and try violently to 
stop it. But the flexibility which sweetness 
and light give, and which is one of the rewards 
of culture pursued in good faith, enables a 
man to see that a tendency may be necessary, 
and even, as a preparation for something in 
the future, salutary, and yet that the genera- 
tions or individuals who obey this tendency 
are sacrificed to it, that they fall short of the 
hope of perfection by following it ; and that 
its mischiefs are to be criticised, lest it should 



5 WEE TNESS A ND LIGH T, 31 

take too firm a hold and last after it has served 
its purpose. 

Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a speech 
at Paris — and others have pointed out the 
same thing — how necessary is the present 
great movement toward wealth and indus- 
trialism, in order to lay broad foundations of 
material well-being for the society of the 
future. The worst of these justifications is, 
that they are generally addressed to the very 
people engaged, body and soul, in the move- 
ment in question ; at all events, that they are 
always seized with the greatest avidity by 
these people, and taken by them as quite jus- 
tifying their life ; and that thus they tend to 
harden them in their sins. Now, culture ad- 
mits the necessity of the movement toward 
fortune-making and exaggerated industrial- 
ism, readily allows that the future may derive 
benefit from it ; but insists, at the same time, 
that the passing generation of industrialists 
— forming, for the most part, the stout main 
body of Philistinism — are sacrificed to it. In 
the same way, the result of all the games and 
sports which occupy the passing generation 
of boys and young men may be the establish- 
ment of a better and sounder physical type 
for the future to work with. Culture does not 



32 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

set itself against the games and sports ; it 
congratulates the future, and hopes it will 
make a good use of its improved physical 
basis , but it points out that our passing gen- 
eration of boys and young men is, meantime, 
sacrificed. Puritanism was perhaps necessary 
to develop the moral fibre of the English 
race, Nonconformity to break the yoke of 
ecclesiastical domination over men's minds 
and to prepare the way for freedom of thought 
in the distant future ; still, culture points out 
that the harmonious perfection of generations 
of Puritans and Nonconformists have been, in 
consequence, sacrificed. Freedom of speech 
may be necessary for the society of the fu- 
ture, but the young lions of the Daily Tele- 
graph in the meanwhile are sacrificed. A 
voice for every man in his country's govern- 
ment may be necessary for the society of the 
future, but meanwhile Mr. Beales and Mr. 
Bradlaugh are sacrificed. 

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many 
faults : and she has heavily paid for them in 
defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the 
modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought 
up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that 
beautiful place, have not failed to seize one 
truth : — the truth that beauty and sweetness 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 33 

are essential characters of a complete human 
perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in 
the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly 
that this, our sentiment for beauty and sweet- 
ness, our sentiment against hideousness and 
rawness, has been at the bottom of our attach- 
ment to so many beaten causes, of our oppo- 
sition to so many triumphant movements. 
And the sentiment is true, and has never been 
wholly defeated, and has shown its power even 
in its defeat. We have not won our political 
battles, we have not carried our main points, 
we have not stopped our adversaries' advance, 
we have not marched victoriously with the 
modern world ; but we have told silently upon 
the mind of the countr)^, we have prepared 
currents of feeling which sap our adversaries' 
position when it seems gained, we have kept 
up our own communication with the future. 
Look at the course of the great movement 
which shook Oxford to its centre some thirty 
years ago ! It was directed, as any one who 
reads Dr. Newman's "Apology" may see, 
against what in one word may be called " Lib- 
eralism." Liberalism prevailed ; it was the 
appointed force to do the work of the hour ; 
it was necessary, it was inevitable that it 
should prevail. The Oxford movement was 
3 



34 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

broken, it failed ; our wrecks are scattered on 
every shore : — 

QvLX. regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? 

But what was it, this liberalism, as Dr. New- 
man saw it, and as it really broke the Oxford 
movement ? It was the great middle-class lib- 
eralism, which had for the cardinal points of 
its belief the Reform Bill of 1832, and local 
self-government, in politics ; in the social 
sphere, free trade, unrestricted competition, 
and the making of large industrial fortunes ; in 
the religious sphere, the Dissidence of Dissent 
and the Protestantism of the Protestant relig- 
ion. I do not say that other and more intelli- 
gent forces than this were not opposed to the 
Oxford movement ; but this was the force 
which really beat it ; this was the force which 
Dr. Newman felt himself fighting with ; this 
was the force which till only the other day 
seemed to be the paramount force in this coun- 
try, and to be in possession of the future ; this 
was the force v/hose achievements fill Mr. 
Lowe with such inexpressible admiration, and 
whose rule he was so horror-struck to see 
threatened. And where is this great force of 
Philistinism now } It is thrust into the second 
rank, it is become a power of yesterday, it has 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 35 

lost the future. A nev/ power has suddenly 
appeared, a power which it is impossible yet to 
judge fully, but which is certainly a wholly 
different force from middle-class liberalism; dif- 
ferent in its cardinal points of belief, different 
in its tendencies in every sphere. It loves and 
admires neither the legislation of middle-class 
Parliaments, nor the local self-government of 
middle-class vestries, nor the unrestricted com- 
petition of middle-class industrialists, nor the 
Dissidence of mxiddle-class Dissent and the 
Protestantism of middle-class Protestant relig- 
ion. I am not now praising this new force, or 
saying that its own ideals are better ; all I say 
is, that they are wholly different. And who 
will estimate how much the currents of feeling 
created by Dr. Newman's movements, the keen 
desire for beauty and sweetness which it 
nourished, the deep aversion it manifested to 
the hardness and vulgarity of middle-class 
liberalism, the strong light it turned on the 
hideous and grotesque illusions of middle-class 
Protestantism, — who will estimate how much 
all these contributed to swell the tide of secret 
dissatisfaction which has mined the ground 
under the self-confident liberalism of the last 
thirty years, and has prepared the way for its 
sudden collapse and supersession? It is in this 



36 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

manner that the sentiment of Oxford for 
beauty and sweetness conquers, and in this 
manner long may it continue to conquer ! 

In this manner it works to the same end as 
culture, and there is plenty of work for it yet 
to do. I have said that the new and more 
democratic force which is now superseding our 
old middle-class liberalisiH cannot yet be 
rightly judged. It has its main tendencies still 
to form. We hear promises of its giving us 
administrative reform, law reform, reform of 
education, and I know not what ; but those 
promises come rather from its advocates, wish- 
ing to make a good plea for it and to justify it 
for superseding middle-class liberalism, than 
from clear tendencies which it has itself yet 
developed. But meanwhile it has plenty of 
well-intentioned friends against whom cul- 
ture may with advantage continue to uphold 
steadily its ideal of human perfeccion; that 
this is an inward spiritual activity ^ having for 
its characters increased sweetjtessy increased 
lights i7icreased lifcj increased sympathy. Mr. 
Bright, who has a foot in both worlds, the 
world of middle-class liberalism and the world 
of democracy, but who brings most of his 
ideas from the world of middle-class liberalism 
in which he was bred, always inclines to in- 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 37 

culcate that faith in machinery to which, as 
we have seen, Englishmen are so prone, and 
which has been the bane of middle-class liber- 
alism. He complains with a sorrowful indig- 
nation of the people who '' appear to have no 
proper estimate of the value of the franchise ;" 
he leads his disciples to believe — what the 
Englishman is always too ready to believe — 
that the having a vote, like the having a large 
family, or a large business, or a large muscle, 
has in itself some edifying and perfecting 
effect upon human nature. Or else he cries 
out to the democracy — "the men," as he calls 
them, "upon whose shoulders the greatness 
of England rests " — he cries out to them : 
" See what you have done ! I look over this 
country and see cities you have built, the rail- 
roads you have made, the manufactures you 
have produced, the cargoes which freight the 
ships of the greatest mercantile navy the 
world has ever seen ! I see that you have 
converted by your labors what was once a 
wilderness, these islands, into a fruitful gar- 
den ; I know that you have created this wealth, 
and are a nation whose name is a word of 
power throughout all the world." Why, this 
is just the very style of laudation with which 
Mr. Roebuck and Mr. Lowe debauch the 



3S SWEETNESS AXD LIGHT. 

minds of the middle classes, and make such 
Philistines of them. It is the same fashion 
of teaching a man to value himself not on 
what he is, not in his progress in sweetness 
and light, but on the number of railroads he 
has constructed, or the bigness of the taber- 
nacle he has built. Only the middle classes 
are told they have done it ail with their energy, 
self-reliance, and capital, and the democracy 
are told they have done it all with their 
hands and sinews. But teaching the democ- 
racy to put its trust in achievements of this 
kind is merely training them to be Philistines, 
to take the place of the Philistines whom they 
are superseding ; and they too, like the middle 
class, will be encouraged to sit down at the 
banquet of the future vv^ithout having on a 
wedding garment, and nothing excellent can 
then come from them. Those who know their 
besetting faults, those who have watched them 
and listened to them, or those who will read 
the instructive account recently given of them 
by one of themselves, the "Journeyman En- 
gineer," will agree that the idea which culture 
sets before us of perfection — an increased 
spiritual activity, having for its characters 
increased sweetness, increased light, increased 
life, increased sympathy — is an idea which 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, 39 

the new democracy needs far more than the 
idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or 
the wonderfulness of its own industrial per- 
formances. 

Other well-meaning friends of this new 
power are for leading it, not in the old ruts 
of middle-class Philistinism, but in ways 
which are naturally alluring to the feet of 
democracy, though in this country they are 
novel and untried ways. I may call them the 
ways of Jacobinism. Violent indignation 
with the past, abstract systems of renovation 
applied wholesale, a new doctrine drawn up 
in black and white for elaborating down to 
the very smallest details a rational society for 
the future, — these are the ways of Jacob- 
inism. Mr. Frederic Harrison and other dis- 
ciples of Comte — one of them, Mr. Congreve, 
is an old acquaintance of mine, and I am glad 
to have an opportunity of publicly express- 
ing my respect for his talents and character 
— are among the friends of democracy who 
are for leading it in paths of this kind. Mr. 
Frederic Harrison is very hostile to culture, 
and from a natural enough motive ; for cul- 
ture is the eternal opponent of the two 
things which are the signal marks of Jacob- 
inism, — its fierceness, and its addiction to an 



' 40 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

abstract system. Culture is always assigning 
to system-makers and systems a smaller share 
in the bent of human destiny than their 
friends like. A current in people's minds 
sets toward new ideas ; people are dissatis- 
fied with their old narrow stock of Philistine 
ideas, Anglo-Saxon ideas, or any other ; and 
some man, some Bentham or Comte, who has 
the real merit of having early and strongly 
felt and helped the new current, but who 
brings plenty of narrowness and mistakes of 
his own into his feeling and help of it, is 
credited with being the author of the whole 
current, the fit person to be entrusted with 
its regulation and to guide the human race. 

The excellent German historian of the my- 
thology of Rome, Preller, relating the intro- 
duction at Rome under the Tarquins of the 
worship of Apollo, the god of light, healing, 
and reconciliation, will have us observe that it 
was not so much the Tarquins who brought to 
Rome the new worship of Apollo, as a current 
in the mind of the Roman people which set 
powerful at that time toward a new worship 
of this kind, and away from the old run of 
Latin and Sabine religious ideas. In a similar 
way culture directs our attention to the natural 
current there is in human affairs, and to its 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 41 

continual working, and will not let us rivet 
our faith upon any one man and his doings. 
It makes us see, not only his good side, but 
also how much in him was of necessity lim- 
ited and transient ; nay, it even feels a pleas- 
ure, a sense of an increased freedom and of 
an ampler future, in so doing. 

I remember when I was under the influence 
of a mind to which I feel the greatest obliga- 
tions, the mind of a man who was the very in- 
carnation of sanity and clear sense, a man the 
most considerable, it seems to me, whom 
America has yet produced,— Benjamin Frank- 
lin, — I remember the relief with which, after 
long feeling the sway of Franklin's impertur- 
bable common-sense, I came upon a project of 
his for a new version of the Book of Job, to 
replace the old version, the style of which, 
says Franklin, has become obsolete, and thence 
less agreeable. "I give," he continues, **a 
few verses, which may serve as a sample of 
the kind of version I would recommend." We 
all recollect the famous verse in our transla- 
tion : " Then Satan answered the Lord and 
said : * Doth Job fear God for nought .? ' " 
Franklin makes this: "Does Your Majesty 
imagine that Job's good conduct is the effect 
of mere personal attachment and affection } " 



42 SWEETNESS' AND LIGHT. 

I well remember how when first I read that, 
I drew a deep breath of relief, and said to my- 
self : " After all, there is a stretch of human- 
ity beyond Franklin's victorious good-sense ! " 
So, after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as 
the renovator of modern society, and Bent- 
ham's mind and ideas proposed as the rulers 
of our future, I open the " Deontology." 
There I read : " While Xenophon was writ- 
ing his history and Euclid teaching geometry, 
Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense 
under pretence of talking wisdom and moral- 
ity. This morality of theirs consisted in 
words ; this wisdom of theirs was the denial 
of matters known to every man's experience." 
From the moment of reading that I am de- 
livered from the bondage of Bentham ! the 
fanaticism of his adherents can touch me no 
longer. I feel the inadequacy of his mind 
and ideas for supplying the rule of human 
society, for perfection. 

Culture tends always thus to deal with the 
men of a system, of disciples, of a school; 
with men like Comte, or the late Mr. Buckle, 
or Mr. Mill. However much it may find to 
admire in these personages, or in some of 
them, it nevertheless remembers the text : 
"Be not ye called Rabbi ! " and it soon passes 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, 43 

on from any Rabbi. But Jacobinism loves a 
Rabbi ; it does not want to pass on from its 
Rabbi in pursuit of a future and still un- 
reached perfection; it wants its Rabbi and 
his ideas to stand for perfection, that they 
may with the more authority recast the world ; 
and for Jacobinism, therefore, culture— eter- 
nally passing onward and seeking— is an im- 
pertinence and an offence. But culture, just 
because it resists this tendency of Jacobinism 
to impose on us a man with limitations and 
errors of his own along with the true ideas of 
which he is the organ, really does the world 
and Jacobinism itself a service. 

So, too. Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of 
the past and of those whom it makes liable 
for the sins of the past, cannot away with the 
inexhaustible indulgence proper to culture, 
the consideration of circumstances, the severe 
judgment of actions joined to the merciful 
judgment of persons. "The man of culture 
is in politics," cries Mr. Frederic Harrison, 
*'one of the poorest mortals alive!" Mr. 
Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, 
and he complains that the man of culture 
stops him with a " turn for small fault-finding, 
love of selfish ease, and indecision in action." 
Of what use is culture, he asks, except for "a 



44 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

critic of new books or a professor of belles- 
lettres?'' Why, it is of use because, in pres- 
ence of the fierce exasperation which breathes, 
or rather, I may say, hisses, through the 
whole production in which Mr. Frederic 
Harrison asks that question, it reminds us 
that the perfection of human nature is sweet- 
ness and light. It is of use, because, like 
religion — that other effort after perfection, — 
it testifies that, where bitter envying and strife 
are, there is confusion and every evil work. 

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pur- 
suit of sweetness and light. He who works 
for sweetness and light, works to make reason 
and the will of God prevail. He who works 
for machinery, he who works for hatred, works 
only for confusion. Culture looks beyond 
machinery, culture hates hatred ; culture has 
one great passion, the passion for sweetness and 
light. It has one even yet greater ! — the pas- 
sion for making them prevail. It is not satis- 
fied till we all come to a perfect man ; it 
knows that the sweetness and light of the few 
must be imperfect until the raw and unkin- 
dled masses of humanity are touched with 
sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk 
from saying that we must work for sweetness 
and light, so neither have I shrunk from say- 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 45 

ing that we must have a broad basis, must 
have sweetness and light for as many as pos- 
sible. Again and again I have insisted how 
those are the happy moments of humanity, 
how those are the marking epochs of a peo- 
ple's life, how those are the flowering times 
for literature and art and all the creative 
power of genius, when there is a national 
glow of life and thought, when the whole of 
society is in the fullest measure permeated 
by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and 
alive. Only it must be real thought and real 
beauty; r^^/sweetness and ^^^/ light. Plenty 
of people will try to give the masses, as they 
call them, an intellectual food prepared and 
adapted in the way they think proper for the 
actual condition of the masses. The ordinary 
popular literature is an example of this way 
of working on the masses. Plenty of people 
will try to indoctrinate the masses with the 
set of ideas and judgments constituting the 
creed of their own profession or party. Our 
religious and political organizations give an 
example of this way of working on the masses. 
I condemn neither way ; but culture works 
differently. It does not try to teach down to 
the level of inferior classes ; it does not try 
to win them for this or that sect of its own, 



46 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, 

with ready-made judgments and watchwords. 
It seeks to do away with classes ; to make 
the best that has been taught and known in 
the world current everywhere ; to make all 
men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and 
light, where they may use ideas, as it uses 
them itself, freely, — nourished, and not bound 
by them. 

This is the social idea ; and the men of cul- 
ture are the true apostles of equality. The 
great men of culture are those who have had 
a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for 
carrying from one end of society to the other, 
the best knowledge, the best ideas of their 
time ; who have labored to divest knowledge 
of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, ab- 
stract, professional, exclusive ; to humanize 
it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the 
cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the 
best knowledge and thought of the time, and 
a true source, therefore, of sweetness and 
light. Such a man was Abelard in the Mid- 
dle Ages, in spite of all his imperfections ; 
and thence the boundless emotion and enthu- 
siasm which Abelard excited. Such were 
Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end 
of the last century ; and their services to 
Germany were in this way inestimably 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 47 

precious. Generations will pass, and literary 
monuments will accumulate, and works far 
more perfect than the works of Lessing and 
Herder will be produced in Germany; and 
yet the names of these two men will fill a 
German with a reverence and enthusiasm such 
as the names of the most gifted masters will 
hardly awaken. And why.!* Because they 
humajtized knowledge; because they broad- 
ened the basis of life and intelligence; be- 
cause they worked powerfully to diffuse sweet- 
ness and light, to make reason and the will of 
God prevail. With St. Augustine they said : 
" Let us not leave Thee alone to make in the 
secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before 
the creation of the firmament, the division of 
light from darkness ; let the children of thy 
spirit, placed in their firmament, make their 
light shine upon the earth, mark the division 
of night and day, and announce the revolution 
of the times ; for the old order is passed, and 
the new arises ; the night is spent, the day is 
come forth ; and thou shalt crown the year 
with thy blessing, when thou shalt send 
forth laborers into thy harvest sown by other 
hands than theirs ; when thou shalt send 
forth new laborers to new seed-times, whereof 
the harvest shall be not yet." 



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